US Pulls out of Paris Climate Accords

[Glorious Leader]

And now China will unquestionably take the lead in clean technology costing America many thousands of jobs.

All to save a few shitty coal mining jobs in shitty swing states.

If that. I suspect market pressures will eliminate those jobs anyway.

[araine]

Very much this. "Cleaner/green" energy usually comes with much more benefits than only greenhouse emissions. Efficiency brings savings, autonomy. Less GHE also tend to have less centralized pollution and toxicity. Nothing will ever be perfect, but the new alternatives bring allot of benefits.

Also, climate change is not only sea levels, it's desertification, droughts, tempest... Which bring diseases, hunger, thirst...

Men tend not to like changes. But by not changing, we will face even more extreme changes ahead.

Climate change and the results of it with increased armed conflicts due to lack of food and water is the greatest danger in the world right now, a billion times more dangerous than ISIS will ever be

[falagar112]

I still don't get the logic behind consistent resistance to cleaner energies. Like, ok, let's take climate change as a whole out of the argument, since corporate elitists and their fans have bought into a line of thinking that profit trumps environmental sustainability. Whatever. Even with that taken out of the equation, all I hear is this:

"What if we clean up the air and water, stop poisoning the soil, slow down deforestation, allow ecosystems to regain equilibrium and rebound, slow down our consumption of limited fuel resources in favor of renewable resources like hydroelectric, geothermal, wind, and solar, continue to push for the far more stable and efficient thorium-based nuclear energy, creating jobs the whole way as we need people to construct the means to harness and produce these energy sources as well as daily maintenance and staff to keep the plants running, and leave our children a greener, healthier planet for no reason? Think of the coal industry and Exxon-Mobil's profit margins!"

And it baffles me that people are more interested in making sure a CEO who doesn't even realize the defender exists can continue to make a few hundred thousand a year stripmining the planet while crippling progress into alternative fuel and energy resources through lobbying than they are in just giving this shit a go and implementing a large-scale retraining push to get all those out-of-work factory workers and coal miners back on the nine-to-five doing something worthwhile other than trying to continue to be a drag on necessary infrastructure overhauls by refusing to learn a new trade in favor of continuing to try desperately propping up a dying industry that produces, pound-for-pound, the least efficient and productive means of producing energy of the lot.

While I obviously agree - it is not so simple as just putting solar panels on all roofs and so on (it's a good start, and is already happening on massive scale in parts of the world) - the problem is that if we want to put it to use on a global level, we need to dedicate certain pieces of the Earth to massive solar farms. And also increase our battery capacity. (as in there are some technological hurdles for that to happen)

Ironically many places like that, like the Sahara, nobody is really interested in, I mean.. it's all sand after all. But it's an unstable area politically, and who is going to invest into a massive building project like that, with all geopolitical risks attached?

I mean yes the solution is that simple but at the same time it's very complicated to make it happen in reality. If Africa would have been a prosperous continent, maybe a different story.

[Thage]

I mean yes the solution is that simple but at the same time it's very complicated to make it happen in reality. If Africa would have been a prosperous continent, maybe a different story.

Well, just speaking for the US (obviously it would require some more intensive foreplanning for a global situation, but even then there's ample open space in continental Europe that could be dedicated to these plants/farms), if we were to rig up hydroelectric farms in the Gulf and out in coastal Oregon, for example, and wind farms in Montana we could probably power the whole nation. At that point it's a question of maintenance (opening up aforementioned jobs long-term after initial construction) and making sure we find spots that aren't frequented by tourists so we don't fuck up the view.

[lockedout]

Finally were out of that dumb shitty accord.

[Akka]

Anti-Trump echo chamber is so strong here and in similar threads. Really, go count how many posts are about 'you Trump people' in this thread and how many of such people actually is around. Same shit in every thread even remotely related to Trump.

The fact that Trump is a walking caricature of a clown that goes beyond fiction has certainly nothing to do with this, obviously.

[LMuhlen]

While I obviously agree - it is not so simple as just putting solar panels on all roofs and so on (it's a good start, and is already happening on massive scale in parts of the world) - the problem is that if we want to put it to use on a global level, we need to dedicate certain pieces of the Earth to massive solar farms. And also increase our battery capacity. (as in there are some technological hurdles for that to happen)

Ironically many places like that, like the Sahara, nobody is really interested in, I mean.. it's all sand after all. But it's an unstable area politically, and who is going to invest into a massive building project like that, with all geopolitical risks attached?

I mean yes the solution is that simple but at the same time it's very complicated to make it happen in reality. If Africa would have been a prosperous continent, maybe a different story.

Solar panels are considerably less efficient when heated up. In a desert they would need to be cooled down, maybe. Maybe a thermal solar plant... Also it's in the middle of nowhere, you would have to transport that energy somewhere else. The beauty of solar rooftops is that they are right there where the energy is needed.

Not saying it's a bad idea, but it's not all sunshine in the world of solar energy ;D

[Zenfoldor]

Your climate accord would do nothing but delay the inevitable. You should not waste a single red cent on reduction of reducing carbon emissions that should instead be given to geoengineering. Sorry, but there should be no one who disagrees with this. If the problem is real, then fixing it rather than trying to slow it down is the way to spend the money.

[lockedout]

Rather than "wondering", why not educate yourself?

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/

Note that most of the legitimate criticism of the IPCC is that it's too conservative in its estimates. They're trying to set projections at high confidence levels, which are best not seen as "we're 95% confident it will be this", and instead seen as "we're 95% confident it will be at least this bad". There's a high chance that it will be worse.

Meanwhile it isn't even close to their predictions.

[Deleted]

It was never ratified by Congress. The US is not obligated to uphold it. Those are out laws, and the rest of the world will have to deal with it. We live in a Republic, not a dictatorship.

If I were Trump I'd send it to Congress. Let them decide whether they want to ratify or not. Let it be debated. Would it be ratified? Probably not, but that's the way our Republic works.

[Glorious Leader]

Worst case scenario? That we pass a major climatic tipping point. It's not something that CAN be modelled or predicted because we have literally no historical examples to pull data from to produce such, but we now they've happened in the past. Just as a for-instance, if warming oceans create an algal bloom, that's global-extinction-event levels of "bad". And that's not a joke; of the handful of major extinction events in Earth's history (95%+ of all life on the planet dying in short order), at least one was due to just such an algal bloom.

While bearing those kinds of possibilities in mind is helpful, it's also not predictable, so it's not like we're on a countdown to armageddon. Just that armageddon could pop up without warning.

Temperature-wise, though, the higher-emissions modeling predicts as high as 5C warming by 2100, but that's at a couple standard deviations above the mean. Still within the model, but it's more likely to be around 4C, if that emissions trend remains true. Even zero emissions are going to lead to warming, at this point, however, she we've already passed a tipping point and between the amount of CO2 already released and the feedback loops the warming creates, we can't put the genie back in the bottle.

My understanding was that their was some talk of iron seeding the oceans precisly because the algae would reduce carbon. The algae bloom has some side effects?

[Pterodactylus]

Finally were out of that dumb shitty accord.

Obama bad, Trump good.

[Jeezy911]

It's about time we stop spending billions of dollars on ridiculous regulations like Climate change. This idea that we are going to somehow save the planet is just a money grab.

[Daelak]

It's about time we stop spending billions of dollars on ridiculous regulations like Climate change. This idea that we are going to somehow save the planet is just a money grab.

I am a well adjusted human and an independent voter, I would never be deluded by propaganda!

[Wyrt]

What's the worst case scenario if we invest in clean energy and climate change turns out to be wrong? We get cleaner air and water. Is that really so bad? "Fuck, we cleaned up the air and water for nothing!"

[Endus]

Meanwhile it isn't even close to their predictions.

Warming trends have been in line with modeling for like 40 years. I don't know where you folks picked up that particular bit of misinformation, but it's ridiculous and wrong.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-models.htm

My understanding was that their was some talk of iron seeding the oceans precisly because the algae would reduce carbon. The algae bloom has some side effects?

A controlled algal bloom isn't bad. An uncontrolled one means that the algae spreads without limit, and ends up choking the oceans to death, both by consuming resources and by blocking light from penetrating due to the thickness of the algae at the surface.

The big issue is that trying to get it under control means killing the algae, but anything we'd use to do that basically kills everything else, too, anyway.

[JohnBrown1917]

It was never ratified by Congress. The US is not obligated to uphold it. Those are out laws, and the rest of the world will have to deal with it. We live in a Republic, not a dictatorship.

If I were Trump I'd send it to Congress. Let them decide whether they want to ratify or not. Let it be debated. Would it be ratified? Probably not, but that's the way our Republic works.

You guys really don't care about large parts of the world, including Florida, going under, do you?




*Among other things.

[Deleted]

What's the worst case scenario if we invest in clean energy and climate change turns out to be wrong? We get cleaner air and water. Is that really so bad? "Fuck, we cleaned up the air and water for nothing!"

Crony capitalism is the worst case scenario.

[DarkTZeratul]

Crony capitalism is the worst case scenario.

You could make an extremely convincing argument for crony capitalism being why the political party currently in charge is fighting so heavily against clean energy investment.

[Dug]

Crony capitalism is the worst case scenario.

Good thing the fossil fuel industry doesn't partake in such actions